Trav's Thoughts

I prefer to make this post on 15 January each year, but sometimes circumstances conspire against me.  This year I share it with you on the national holiday established to commemorate the birth of Dr King.  While my company doesn't include it in its 7 observable holidays in 2013, we were offered it in 2012.

I always choose to observe the day with more focus on acts of kindness.  While I try to be kind every day, on MLK Day I'm more reflective about my daily behavior to ensure that I'm getting it the way Dr King wanted it got.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr, 15 January 1929 - 4 April 1968

These are some of the things he said or wrote.

"Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it."

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

"Let no man pull you low enough to hate him."

"Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true."

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence."

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

These words were all spoken or written more than 45 years ago, and yet they still resonate. I believe that words do have power because of the strength of conviction behind them.

Today I honor the memory of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, but I try to live by his words every day.